On the set of Dennis Leary's, Rescue Me

(originally from July 21, 2008)

I finally got booked by Barbara Mc Namara castings to work on the Dennis Leary show "Rescue Me" this past Monday. The last time this agency called me was for that shitty movie Duplicity starring the 20 million dollar a movie, Julia Roberts. She makes all this money yet she was too cheap to give us lunch.

As for Rescue me, it turned out to be a quick and painless set. First of all the call-time was for 8:30 am and it was over at Chambers St. in the Tribeca area, which takes only 20 minutes express train to get there from Astoria and transferring on the 2 train in Manhattan.

The holding/catering was over at this brand new Stuyvesant high school.

This was a top grade school with a ton of money that went into it. The type of kids that go there are from parents that make a 6 income figure for sure. This wasn't some run down school in Harlem with ghetto kids.

Plus since it was summer, there were not too many students around. As soon as I got there, I was happy with the location. What was even better was the food truck parked right outside. They had everything from bagel to lox platters, personalized omelet station, sausages, fresh fruits. The works!

I dove into the fresh lox which was garnished with onions, tomatoes and capers. It was great. Plus they had those gourmet coffee machines where you put one packet in at a time for a variety of different flavors. So decadent. I know you would appreciate it.

After the breakfast, we were all called inside to shoot. It must have been only a half an hour from the time I got there. This was the best part, the scene was indoors in the auditorium of this school and it was air-conditioned. There were only a handful of background extras, about 20.

I was cast as one of the faculty members to sit in this auditorium and watch this high school play about the civil war. The kids that were there were dressed in the civil war costumes. The thing is we never even got to see the play. We sat in the seats for about 15 minutes and then they moved on to the next scene.

So we sat outside in holding to wait for the next scene for the P.A. to bring us back in. To my advantage the P.A only selected a few people to go back in and I wasn't one of them. For once I felt good about being rejected!

The best part was that since we were in a high school, this meant that there must be a library. So me and a friend of mine asked the security guard where it was. He told us it was on the 6th floor. Yes, this was one big High school.

One of the other P.A.s was walking around and asked us to stay close to the area if we are needed. I was like "ya right", they won't use us for the rest of the day!" Still it was a risk to take off like that in terms of if you do get caught, they can rip up your voucher and you don't get paid.

So we were very cautious and waited for the P.A. to go around the corner than we quickly dashed into the elevator and went up to the 6th floor. We got there they did not have a library. What they had was called a media center! It was more like a museum hall how spiffy and brand new it looked. It was like a library only there were rows of computers for any ones use in the school. I though you needed a password, though all you had to do was click the Internet explorer icon and you were in!

We sat down at our computers and logged into our casting network accounts to start submitting for roles. Since I don't have an I-phone or e-mail on my phone, I still have to submit this way. We did all our submissions and than we had to sneak back downstairs. I'm sure we weren't suppose to even use those computers, though I guess we actually did look like we were part of the school being white and dressing like a librarian or Biology teacher.

Getting back to one was a little tricky as we had to get off the same elevator we got on and we had no idea where the P.A. would be. What we ended up doing was getting off the second floor, walking down the stairs and getting out the back door where we had to carefully look around the corner and pass the lockers to get back to holding area.

It kind of felt like the movie "Breakfast Club" at the part when they leave the library and wander the halls and carefully walk down the halls trying not to run into the dean. We made it back and it was a lot of fun. My friend said that I like taking risks. Maybe, for fun.

Shortly after we returned to holding, we were wrapped at 2pm and the P.A. said that we could also have the lunch if we wanted. We signed out and had the lunch. It was gourmet lunch with all these great salads, pasta and different types of meat and fish. It was SO good and since there were not too many people there, I took some food home and ate for 2 nights out of it.

Thank-you Dennis Leary and the caterers on "Rescue Me". If only every day on set could be like this. Unfortunately you only get these great sets rarely.

The next day was the total opposite. I was booked on this Serbian Independent movie which shot for 15 hours in Brooklyn. Not a fun day. Plus if I knew it was a “Serbian” movie, I would not have accepted it. More on that in the next blog.

A.